Research On The Relationship Of Internal Marketing, Employee Loyalty And Service Quality Of Commercial Banks In China

With the globalization development of financial economy, there is an increasing number of foreign banks pouring into China’s financial market. The flourishing development of numerous private banks and other non-bank financial institutions makes our banking market diversified and the competition in the banking sector become increasingly fierce. To win the competition, commercial banks constantly develop new products, conduct various forms of marketing and provide more efficient and effective service. It is a common path for commercial banks to provide efficient and effective service for external customers, cultivate external customer loyalty thus effectively attract and retain loyal customers to improve profitability and competitiveness in the fierce competition. Therefore, most banks focus their main attention on how to improve external customers’loyalty while ignoring cultivating the internal employee loyalty, resulting in low internal employee loyalty, high dropout rate, low service quality. Ultimately, banks are getting difficult to raise external customer loyalty and banks profitability. Therefore, China’s commercial banks must improve external customer loyalty and enhance service quality on the premise of improving internal employee loyalty. Internal marketing, as the main source of employee loyalty, is an integral and important part of external marketing, and the foothold and starting point for implementing external marketing.Although in recent years, domestic scholars have done a lot of researches about internal marketing theory, there is a big gap between foreign researches in contents as well as methods, Research area is relatively simple and a lot of researches are only proceed from theoretical analysis and countermeasures research, very few are empirical research which studies the impact and mechanism of commercial banks’ internal marketing, employee loyalty and service quality. Therefore, this study, from the perspective of internal marketing theory, explores the relationship of internal marketing, employee loyalty and service quality of commercial banks. Specific contents are as follows:This paper, first combing with the development of China’s commercial banks, introduces the practical and theoretical backgrounds of the study, the significances and the purposes expecting to achieve. Then, it analyzed the connotations of internal marketing, employee loyalty and service quality, relevant research results at home and abroad and theories are also reviewed. Thirdly, according to the existing literature, this paper interprets the relationship of the three and the logical connotation. Based on the relationship, it builds the theoretical model of commercial banks’internal marketing, employee loyalty and service quality, then, research assumptions are put forward based on the logical relationship and theoretical model. Fourthly, according to the reference of the research literature, this study developes research survey scales, and makes the scale reliability, validity test and factor analysis. Through descriptive analysis, structural equation modeling analysis and multiple regression analysis, empirical analysis are made to study the influencing mechanism of bank’s internal marketing on staff service quality.The results show that:firstly, commercial bank staffs have basically good expertise; they can protect customer privacy well and provide customer with basic service, but still needs improving in providing personalized service and establishing a good contact with the customer. Secondly, internal marketing of commercial banks has a significant positive impact on employee loyalty. Among the internal marketing, training, communication and bank culture have a significant positive impact on employees’attitude loyalty, communication, incentive, authorization and participation as well as bank culture have a significant positive impact on employees’ behavior loyalty. Thirdly, employee loyalty of commercial banks is positively related to staff service quality. Both employees’attitude loyalty and behavioral loyalty are influenced significantly and positively by tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy of service quality. Fourthly, internal marketing of commercial banks has a direct positive effect on staff service quality. Internal marketing has different effects on tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy of service quality. Staff attitude loyalty and behavior loyalty of commercial banks have partial mediation effect on the relationship between the banks’ internal marketing and bank staff service quality. Internal marketing of the commercial banks can not only affect service quality directly, but also indirectly by the partial mediation effect of employees’ attitude loyalty and behavioral loyalty. Finally, some corresponding countermeasures and suggestions for improving service quality of commercial banks are put forward, has a very important reference value to the staff services enhance the quality of China’s commercial banks, hoping to have certain reference value for commercial banks in China. At the same time, the limitations of this research and research prospects are pointed out in the end.